Reflections on living with and caring for animals

Jan Challenge, Day 7, Lessons from the Week & Bodhi update

07January 2017January 7, 2017January 7, 2017January 6, 2017

I’m surprised at the little things I’ve learned this week, just from spending time with my camera. No fabulous photos today, mostly just practice work. I went from having no tripods a couple months ago to having two now, one really solid one and one lighter one for travel. Since it was dark in the house today, and 20 degrees outside, it was a good day to work with the tripod and totally manual settings.

Lessons from the week…The first is that the camera sees more than I do.

Like Bodhi’s collar hanging way out there…

Or that lovely little group of fur sticking up behind his head, caught in the collar. You really have to look at all the little details when shooting, something I clearly need to practice.

The other lesson is that once you get used to a lens that focuses manually, it is really hard to use auto-focus. Auto-focus has its own ideas about what you want to focus on, and they don’t always (often?) match mine. I had to switch back over to my Zeiss lens while I was shooting today. My other lens kept focusing on Bodhi’s body instead of his head. You can only fix so much with the “clarity” slider in Photoshop.

For those of you who have followed Bodhi’s story, a short update. He has made huge strides since we put him on the meds. He is no longer leaking urine, and he is drinking an appropriate amount of water instead of twice what he should. But…there’s always a but…he is still not concentrating his urine after five days on the meds. We’re giving it another week to see if it is just taking some time to flush out his kidneys. Keep your paws crossed that his test late next week looks better. An internal disease specialist is really not in the budget!

The fact that your camera sees more than you do should celebrated, and then ignored. The idiosyncrasies that your camera is seeing is the difference between a photo about life, and a photo clinically produced. Who really likes “posed” photos? Natural is surely more pleasing (and certainly more authentic) so let his collar hang to one side; let bits of his coat stick up. In our Ray’s case… so what if he drools just in time for the camera; so what if you can just see part of his tongue; so what if he has one ear up and one ear down. That is what gives Ray personality, and the photo credibility. 🙂

Paws crossed for Bodhi. At least he is living a great life now with humans that love him. As for cameras, they see way more than I do. I have a collection (literally hundreds) of shots that have goofy things I totally missed. Some are endearing (like Bodhi’s fur) and some are not (like wires coming out of a head). Glad you are enjoying your tripods. The last time I used one was when I was trying to catch who was going into my pond at night. That’s when a deer came up to the camera and took a selfie. That was a perfect picture!